Dorothy Schneider, writing for the Lafayette Journal & Courier, has an article about the progress of SB 32 which concerns the vote center model of conducting elections. The bill has passed the Senate and out of the House committee. It might get a full House vote this week.
The basic premise is that, rather than having to vote in your precinct, you can vote anywhere in the county but get the same ballot you would get if you had gone to your specific precinct location. This was a pilot project in Wayne, Tippecanoe, and (I believe) Cass counties. The model seems to have been pretty well liked in Tippecanoe County. The problem currently is that the original period of the pilot project is set to expire. If new legislation isn’t passed, we have to revert back to the old way of doing things which a) will cost money; and b) most people don’t seem to like quite as well. Last year’s bill got tied in with some other, more controversial, provisions and died. This year, the vote center bill seems to be moving pretty fast and, hopefully, can stay relatively clean and get passed without getting bogged down with other stuff.
This particular bill redesignates the original pilot counties as vote center counties. In addition, it gives other counties in the state the option and a procedure for switching to that model if they’d like. Exercising the option would require a unanimous vote of the county’s election board.
Doug, how exactly has this worked? Do they completely get rid of precinct voting, or do the vote centers sit on top of precinct voting?
I support vote centers, but only if they completely get rid of precinct voting. My hope is that you would get one or two voting centers per town, at say the high school and town hall, or whatever. This would replace the 10 or 15 polling places that we have with precinct voting.
Precinct voting results in some really stupid polling places. In Hammond, they vote at a body shop, liquor store, and union hall, among other places. If we could get to a point where we are only voting on government property (schools, municipal buildings) I think it would improve things. It doesn’t feel right voting at a body shop (okay, I was poll watching, not voting, but it still felt wrong).
Instead of precinct voting places, there were 19 vote center locations in Tippecanoe County. I guess I don’t know how many precincts voting locations there were, but I believe it was a lot more.
Here is the county election board’s website on vote centers.
Bet Charlie White is good with this one.
Precincts vs. Vote Centers – In 2007, Tippecanoe County had a total of 93
voting precincts and 86,358 registered voters. Of the total precincts, 58 are
located within municipalities. In 2003, we had 49 precincts within municipalities
and 49 voting locations. The increase in municipal precincts was a result of both
growth and annexations. Many of the annexations involved only a small number
of voters, so we estimate that we would have had 52 polling locations for the
2007 election had we conducted a conventional election.
In the 2007 election, we used 22 Vote Centers. In hindsight, this was
more than was required. Please see page 12 of this report discusses this issue
in detail.
Looking ahead to 2008, we anticipate that we will have 100 voting
precincts. If we were to conduct a conventional election, we would have a
minimum of 78 polling places.
So you went from 49 polls with precincts to 22 with vote centers? And much less in subsequent elections?
That’s OK, but I’d like to see an even greater reduction. Lake County has 554 precincts. How about 22 vote centers for the whole county?
When I ran for Marion County Clerk in 2002, I indicated I would support vote centers (I referred to them as “voting centers”) to replace precinct voting. You would have thought I was from outer space talking some alien language. No one understood how they would possibly work.